I've fallen down a home server rabbit hole over the past few months:

- purchased an Intel N100 mini PC
- running Proxmox with ~30 LXC containers and VMs
- PiHole for network-wide adblocking
- Paperless for document scanning, storage, and LLM-based retrieval 
- Home Assistant for full home automation (lights on/off based on motion, etc)
- Plex for media server
- nginx proxy manager for reverse proxy to expose services to internet

I can understand why people love this hobby

cma.xyz. Founder /paragraph, ceo /mirror, previously at Google & Coinbase 

what is some advise or cool thing you learned along the way that you didn’t expect

interspace.fi via sequence. pimlico. poap. polygon. metamask. paxful. flipside crypto. dash. bridgewater. darpa. secdef. navy. dia. linktr.ee/alexanderchopan

Advice: just start tinkering. There's so much cool open source tech that can be self-hosted and automated (ad blocking, streaming, VPNs, home automation, etc) that you'll easily fall down a rabbithole during your exploration

Cool realization: never realized the self-hosted community is so large & passionate!